


Just Keep Swimming

by Kharnesh



Category: Blindspot (TV)
Genre: Finding Nemo references, Introspection, Making Oneself, Nature Versus Nurture, Preferences, Season/Series 01, Tea, Thai Food, finding nemo - Freeform, thought provoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 10:09:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8323840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kharnesh/pseuds/Kharnesh
Summary: Jane contemplates Nature vs. Nurture.





	

There wasn’t much to do in the safehouse except eat, sleep, and do pull-ups until Jane’s muscles spasmed. Jane didn’t like to complain to her handlers, but the food was all takeout, the bed was lumpy, and she really needed a leg day.

She had brought up her boredom casually while chatting with Patterson one day and had been rewarded with a dusty DVD player and a stack of movies. Patterson said she had included everything Jane would need in order to fill in the gaping holes of her schema.

Jane’s FBI handlers came in that night and connected the box to her tiny television. They left a bag of Thai takeout behind when they returned to their car.

Jane took the first DVD from the stack and popped it in, not paying attention to the title or cover. She opened the takeout and folded back the paper box lids while the opening scene played.

Fish. Animated fish. Jane laughed, inhaling a cube of tofu. She choked, then coughed, then cried. Dead animated fish babies.

She paused the movie, tear tracks still on her cheeks, and read the movie summary on the case. Jane shook her head. Finding Nemo was messed up.

Jane put the paper box down and pushed it away. She didn’t like spicy tofu. She didn’t like anything she had been given for dinner that day. Thai food just wasn’t that great.

Jane sighed and pushed herself further into the crease of the understuffed chair cushions. The hard bits of spring pushed back at her, gouging and pinching. She pressed play, finished watching the movie, and went to bed hungry.

 

The next day at work, Patterson wanted to know how Jane had spent her evening. She asked again and again, always with a different arrangement of words, but always with the same intent. Jane kept silent, still mulling over the animated journey.

When the rest of the team caught wind of their conversation, they joined in with their own arrangement of words and the same intent.

Jane cracked during lunch when all four pairs of eyes focused in on her.

“I like Dory.”

Their mouths began to quirk into smiles, but then they stopped, obviously deliberating their next move. The silence lingered, and Jane stared down at her salad. Zapata broke the awkward mantle that had shrouded over the table.

“From Nemo, right? Damn, Patterson, why’re you giving her kid’s movies?” She touched Jane’s wrist gently while a glint sharpened in her eyes. “You need to see Magic Mike.”

Everyone else groaned, and Jane could feel the atmosphere lighten. She smiled a bit, trying a little harder to meet everyone’s eyes.

 

Jane watched Finding Nemo again that night. She watched it the next night as well, and the night after that.

Every morning, someone would ask Jane what she had watched the night before, and every morning, she would reply, “I still like Dory.”

 

One day, when almost everyone had headed home, she stopped Reade in the locker room. He was a smart man, Reade, and Jane wanted to understand how he saw the world.

“Do you think Dory is Dory?” she started, but then shook her head. “Not like ‘is that her name,’ but, I mean…”

Reade was patient. He put his bag down on the bench, letting her take a moment.

“I mean, do you think that the Dory who just forgot Marlin is the same Dory that knew Marlin?”

Jane looked up at him, scrunching her eyebrows together with disappointment. The way she had worded that question hadn’t sounded right, but Reade seemed to be thinking it through. Jane thought he might have understood what she had really been asking.

“It’s basically the nature versus nurture argument,” he said. “Are we who we are because of the innate traits we were born with, or are we shaped more by the experiences we go through in life?”

Jane shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Reade nodded his. “Neither do I.”

 

There was a coffee pot and a hot water boiler in the small break room Weller and his team used. An agent was already there pouring himself a cup of tea when Jane came in that morning. She came up beside him, reaching for the coffee pot, when she smelled the warm, herby fumes coming off the agent’s cup.

Nature versus nurture, she thought. Was she Taylor because of what she had been born with, or was she Jane because of what she had gone through? There were still traces of memories in her head, things that Taylor had done, but they all seemed so far away. They felt like movie clippings; unreal and disassociated.

Memories were just electric pulses dancing on neuron receptors, and most of Taylor’s memories had been wiped away like years of built up grime from a window. Taylor had been ripped from her body, and Jane was building herself anew from the rubble.

She pulled her hand back from the coffee pot and turned to the agent.

“Do you have anything that tastes like grass trimmings?”

Taylor had preferred coffee, and Jane had followed in her footsteps. She had been trying to regain what she had lost, but Jane had started to realize that she hadn’t really lost anything. She had never been Taylor. Jane had been created in that duffel bag, and she had climbed out of it like a babe from the womb. She had been born there in Times Square, but Jane felt like she had only just pulled the caul from over her eyes to realize that Taylor had been but a dream. Sweet dream or nightmare, she knew not, but a dream all the same.

 

Jane couldn’t tell whether Dory was lucky or not. No matter what she remembered or forgot, she always ended up in the same place. She always put her trust in Marlin, no matter which parts of her remained.

Jane couldn’t do that. She didn’t put her trust in Oscar because Oscar had belonged to Taylor. Jane didn’t put her trust in him because she couldn’t put her trust in Taylor. Jane could understand how they both must have believed in the superiority of nature, seeing how their whole plan, whatever it was, had hinged on it so entirely, but she didn’t agree.

Jane had thrown her understuffed chair out the front door, taking a deep pleasure in watching it smash to pieces on the cement steps and the shocked looks on her handlers’ faces. They moved a plush, opulent cloud of an armchair into her apartment the next day. She liked to sit in it, curled up like a centipede, and stuff her face with box after box of spicy tofu takeout. She would drink green tea by the gallon, always keeping a thermos at her side, whether she was in the office or in a car chase.

Jane nurtured herself. She shaped herself daily, putting thought and consideration into each of her actions.

 

Mayfair died in her arms, and Oscar died at her hand.

Jane walked away from the farmhouse blaze, putting one foot in front of the other. 

“When life gets you down, do you wanna know what you’ve gotta do?” Jane sang to herself.

Step by step, she removed herself from the world of Taylor. Jane wrapped herself in memories of soft cushions, spicy tofu, and green tea. She reminded herself of what it meant to be Jane.

“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming.”

**Author's Note:**

> The one thing that really bothered me during season one was that no one ever brought up the Nurture vs. Nature argument. For a show that weighs so heavily on an amnesiac lead, I thought for sure they would try to work this element in somehow. But they didn't, so I decided to try my hand at writing an interpretation of it.
> 
> I really did enjoy the process of writing this piece, so I hope you enjoy reading it!
> 
> Special thanks to my mother for being my beta for this piece.


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